Recently more and more vendors decided to make their products available free of charge. I think it is worth collecting my favourite ones into one post. Continue reading…
Today I built a VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1 demo environment for training purposes. I am going to give customer training and I want to demonstrate the capabilities of the latest version of SRM to the audience. Unfortunately I don’t have two physical storage controllers that I could use as mirrored storage pairs, so I decided to use NetApp’s DataONTAP Simulator. NetApp’s Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) supports FC, iSCSI and NFS as well, so using the Simulator with iSCSI or NFS is the easiest way to set up a demo environment. Continue reading…
As a VMware partner I was aware of the upcoming features and changes in vSphere 5.1, unfortunately I was not allowed to talk about it because of a signed NDA. As VMware officially released the new version and made it available for the public, everyone had the chance to try it and explore its improvements. Continue reading…
With the release of vSphere 5.0 VMware has introduced a new member of the vStorage API family called vStorage API for Storage Awareness (VASA). With VASA vCenter can read the capabilities of the underlying LUNs storing virtual machines. If you are not familiar with this vSphere feature, you can find a great article about it here. Each storage vendor implements VASA function in a different way. I was curious about it, so I tried VASA with NetApp’s DataONTAP 8.1.1 simulator. Continue reading…
In a recent project of mine I had to design the LAN access of a NetApp FAS2000 storage system. The customer had two separated Layer-2 networks: a PRODUCTION and a BACKUP one. The production access switch’s capabilities and bandwidth was far way beyond the backup one’s, therefore the requirement was that both controllers have to send all the NFS, CIFS, iSCSI and management traffic to this direction. In case of a network failure there is a backup network that has network devices with narrower bandwidth and lower performance, although if needed it could forward the traffic until the production devices work again. Continue reading…
I have met several situations when customers considered buying VMware vSphere Enterprise edition just for the Storage vMotion function. Also my SMB customers have found this feature extremely useful for themselves but their budget was not so flexible to allow them to buy the appropriate license level of vSphere. This is where Veeam’s Quick Migration could help! I have been curious about Veeam’s Quick Migration function since the first time I heard of it. And so have been my customers, since this service of Veeam can save a lot of pain (and money) for them. Continue reading…
15 March is one of Hungary’s National Days. On this day we celebrate the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. In 1848-49 Hungary was fighting for its freedom and independence from the Austrian Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy. 15 March 2012 VMware customers could celebrate something totally different: SRM 5.0.1 got released. Continue reading…
With the spread of SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) systems a new scalability issue came up: CPU-memory communication became a bottleneck (again.) In spite of the newest and fastest multicore CPUs, bandwidth of Northbridge wasn’t enough to take advantage of new developments. Continue reading…
I am proud to say that I am leaving for Las Vegas next week to attend VMware’s biggest conference for its partners: VMware Partner Exchange 2012. Last October I attended VMworld in Coppenhagen, and I can tell that the conference was above all my previous expectations. Continue reading…
Recently I designed the protection of virtual machines with SRM at one of Hungary’s biggest factories. Before doing it I tried to look for useful design principles on the Internet, but there was nothing I could find. This is why I decided to share my thoughts how I designed it last time. Continue reading…
